Domestic cats are loathsome things.
They are loathsome precisely for those attributes which endear them to their brainwashed owners.
They are arrogantly independent; they are territorial in that they regard everywhere as being their own; they use only other peoples gardens as toilets never their own; they have horrid teeth; they eat nastily with little nibbles; they slink; they target me when I am in an owner’s house and leap on my lap and smirk at me as I have to stroke them with a pretence of civility. Ugh!
I was, until recently, a dog person. Admittedly a very particular dog person: only yellow Labrador bitches were acceptable. All other dogs were a pale and ineffectual reflection of the One Breed. I now realize that statement sounds just a tinge fascist, but let it pass, let it pass.
I am a dog person no more.
It has taken the demented barking of the next door neighbour’s melancholic mutt to change my mind.
They have built a sort of pen for their pets in the space created by the shape of our houses. The living room is at first floor level and the space underneath is an open area linking the front and back gardens. In this prison lie two dogs: one is a weasel-like rat-dog with a half-hearted bark which makes it sound as though he is inside the house. The other is a larger creature who shows his despair at being left outside by barking morosely every second on the second.
Sometimes his limited litany sparks off other animals in the neighbourhood (it is de rigueur to incarcerate a canine in this part of the world) and there is a demented choir of discordant life forms yelping out their desolation to the uncaring heavens and one deeply affected neighbour!
I have not plucked up enough courage to go next door and tell the inconsiderate (or perhaps deaf) members of the household that there is not a system of sound baffles around their baying beast and it is quite easy to hear it over and above any other sounds that a normal house makes.
The reason for my reticence is that I will have to do the complaining in Spanish and what I am likely to say is going to be direct and abrupt and lack the ironic sophistication which would usually accompany any expression of displeasure were I to speak in my native tongue. You might well aver that directness could be the most effective approach, but these people have bought, not rented their house, and so they are likely to be here as our neighbours for as long as we rent the place. One has to consider the possibility of animosity over an extended period weighed against a (fully justified) complaint about the noise of the dogs. Noise which may well continue without the slightest abatement after the complaint has been made.
Why can’t people simply behave properly?
Ah, the question which has dogged social reformers throughout time! And now dogs me. Doggone it!
Today is the construction of the Great Bamboo Wall to try and lessen the potential noise of the neighbours on the other side.
I do realize that this writing is making me appear to be a paranoid sound hater; but you really do have to live here to discover just how bloody-mindedly inconsiderate people can be. Though if you merely observe how people park in any normal supermarket car park then you realize just how selfish people can be!
Today is also Part IX of the clearing out of the Third Floor. To be fair, you can move about a bit there now, but it is not yet the slinkily, smoothly efficient modern office working space that I envisaged when I first saw the room. Again, like the books, I am working towards the summer for completion of this project. You will note that I did not state the year.
So, once more off to Gavá to visit the hardware store confusingly called Bauhaus – though the sheer vulgarity of most of the stuff they sell there and the place in which they sell it would have been rejected with horrified contempt by the original founders of that stripped back statement of sheer steel and glass that characterized one of the most important temples to Modernism.
I’m not sure that that statement of easy pretention sits well with a person who is going to construct a bamboo wall to baffle the neighbours – though perhaps Paul Klee might have approved!
They are loathsome precisely for those attributes which endear them to their brainwashed owners.
They are arrogantly independent; they are territorial in that they regard everywhere as being their own; they use only other peoples gardens as toilets never their own; they have horrid teeth; they eat nastily with little nibbles; they slink; they target me when I am in an owner’s house and leap on my lap and smirk at me as I have to stroke them with a pretence of civility. Ugh!
I was, until recently, a dog person. Admittedly a very particular dog person: only yellow Labrador bitches were acceptable. All other dogs were a pale and ineffectual reflection of the One Breed. I now realize that statement sounds just a tinge fascist, but let it pass, let it pass.
I am a dog person no more.
It has taken the demented barking of the next door neighbour’s melancholic mutt to change my mind.
They have built a sort of pen for their pets in the space created by the shape of our houses. The living room is at first floor level and the space underneath is an open area linking the front and back gardens. In this prison lie two dogs: one is a weasel-like rat-dog with a half-hearted bark which makes it sound as though he is inside the house. The other is a larger creature who shows his despair at being left outside by barking morosely every second on the second.
Sometimes his limited litany sparks off other animals in the neighbourhood (it is de rigueur to incarcerate a canine in this part of the world) and there is a demented choir of discordant life forms yelping out their desolation to the uncaring heavens and one deeply affected neighbour!
I have not plucked up enough courage to go next door and tell the inconsiderate (or perhaps deaf) members of the household that there is not a system of sound baffles around their baying beast and it is quite easy to hear it over and above any other sounds that a normal house makes.
The reason for my reticence is that I will have to do the complaining in Spanish and what I am likely to say is going to be direct and abrupt and lack the ironic sophistication which would usually accompany any expression of displeasure were I to speak in my native tongue. You might well aver that directness could be the most effective approach, but these people have bought, not rented their house, and so they are likely to be here as our neighbours for as long as we rent the place. One has to consider the possibility of animosity over an extended period weighed against a (fully justified) complaint about the noise of the dogs. Noise which may well continue without the slightest abatement after the complaint has been made.
Why can’t people simply behave properly?
Ah, the question which has dogged social reformers throughout time! And now dogs me. Doggone it!
Today is the construction of the Great Bamboo Wall to try and lessen the potential noise of the neighbours on the other side.
I do realize that this writing is making me appear to be a paranoid sound hater; but you really do have to live here to discover just how bloody-mindedly inconsiderate people can be. Though if you merely observe how people park in any normal supermarket car park then you realize just how selfish people can be!
Today is also Part IX of the clearing out of the Third Floor. To be fair, you can move about a bit there now, but it is not yet the slinkily, smoothly efficient modern office working space that I envisaged when I first saw the room. Again, like the books, I am working towards the summer for completion of this project. You will note that I did not state the year.
So, once more off to Gavá to visit the hardware store confusingly called Bauhaus – though the sheer vulgarity of most of the stuff they sell there and the place in which they sell it would have been rejected with horrified contempt by the original founders of that stripped back statement of sheer steel and glass that characterized one of the most important temples to Modernism.
I’m not sure that that statement of easy pretention sits well with a person who is going to construct a bamboo wall to baffle the neighbours – though perhaps Paul Klee might have approved!
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